Chapter 114: Chapter 114
"Full of myself?" Ishtar’s voice climbed half an octave, the shriek of a cat whose tail had just met a boot heel.
"You’re calling me full of myself?"
"Well, yes." Kiriya spread his hands like the answer was painted on the sky.
"Isn’t that obvious? Someone like you doesn’t measure up to one finger of my Hestia. Forgive me, but it wasn’t a hard call."
"Kiriya...!"
Up in the window, Hestia went pink to the ears, eyes going glassy, looking two seconds from dissolving into a happy puddle.
Hermes let out a quiet breath beside her.
The boy knew exactly which words to reach for — and he could shrug off a Goddess of Beauty’s charm while he did it.
That kind of willpower wasn’t nothing to laugh at.
The crowd, meanwhile, lost the plot entirely.
"Pfft— hahaha, this kid’s too much—"
"Right? And that devotion to his goddess! As a card-carrying supporter of pure love, I am feasting."
"He shrugged off a beauty goddess’s charm. That’s genuinely the coolest thing I’ve seen all week!"
Watching the insufferable Ishtar eat a loss in public turned out to be its own kind of entertainment.
Not everyone was thrilled, mind you — one young adventurer girl was openly sniffling somewhere in the back.
"He’s that loyal? So I don’t even have a shot in the future?"
The men kept it simpler.
A solid wall of thumbs-ups....a true sigma, top to bottom!
But for all the easy laughter rolling through the street, Ishtar herself was somewhere far darker, rage building toward a boil.
"You’re saying I’m beneath that runt? That broke, boring little hearth goddess?" Every word out of his mouth felt like a fist closing around the one thing she’d never had questioned — her beauty.
"Naturally." Kiriya didn’t even raise his voice. "Every time I look at Hestia I want to bundle her up and spoil her rotten. You—" he glanced at Ishtar like she was a smell, then actually pinched his nose and took two steps back, "—I just want to stand a healthy distance away from."
It wasn’t that Ishtar was ugly.
Quite the opposite — as Goddesses of Beauty went, she sat near the very top of the rankings.
She simply wasn’t his type.
Kiriya liked a new car.
A pristine luxury model, ideally.
He could even live with a well-kept used one if it really caught his eye. But a public bus that needed charm just to get men to climb aboard? As a fresh-faced beginner, that was frankly beyond his license class, and the mental hurdle alone was a non-starter.
A woman whose whole appeal ran on hypnosis wasn’t far off the cheap mind-control leads in some late-night web serial.
If ’Mirror Calm’ hadn’t kicked in on its own — that automatic, absolute mental shield — he might genuinely have ended up another one of her simps.
The thought alone made his skin crawl!
"You— you—" Ishtar’s eyes burned, her chest heaving hard enough that her outfit looked one breath from full structural failure.
Her patience was gone.
And since it was gone, she saw no reason to pretend otherwise!
She stepped in and swung for his face.
Smack.
Kiriya caught her wrist out of the air.
His grip closed like an iron clamp, tight enough that she felt the bones grind, and a sharp cry slipped out before she could stop it.
"Goddess Ishtar." He smiled. The smile didn’t reach his eyes — something cold flickered there instead.
"Can’t take losing?"
His patience with this preening, spoiled woman had run dry, and every time the thought of Phryne surfaced, the temperature in his chest dropped another degree.
So from the center of his palm, a single thread-fine wooden thorn slid free and pricked her skin.
A handful of splinters, each smaller than a grain of sand, slipped into her bloodstream, riding the current until they came to rest snug against her heart.
They were far too tiny for a mortal body to register.
Out here, in daylight, under a hundred witnesses, he couldn’t very well cut down a goddess.
But come nightfall, all it would take was a thought — a small, quiet command for those slivers to stir — and the whole house would come down.
After that, Ishtar would have exactly one road left open to her.
Back to Heaven.
And Phryne, of course.
That one had already outlived her usefulness. Might as well clear the table on the same trip!
Ishtar knew none of it.
The pain in her wrist swallowed everything else, and she had no idea the clock on her time in the mortal world had just started ticking.
So she stayed exactly as arrogant as ever, already winding up to slap him a second time.
"You little bastard, let go of me! How dare you put a hand on a goddess—"
Smack.
A different small hand got there first, cracking clean across Ishtar’s cheek.
The sound rang down the whole street, and the street went dead silent in an instant.
"Ishtar. That’s enough." Hestia shook out her stinging hand, her voice gone flat and cold.
"You— you hit me?" Ishtar cradled her face, and her expression cycled through grievance, fury, disbelief, and pure shock in the space of a second — a one-woman emotional weather system!
"That’s right. I hit you. Got a problem with that?" Hestia barely reached the woman’s collarbone, but the pressure rolling off her kept climbing until Ishtar found she couldn’t quite hold her gaze.
"Your children challenged us and lost. Completely. Every person on this street heard the terms — if they lost, we could do as we pleased with them. Or am I misremembering something?"
"That was their decision, not—"
"Without their goddess signing off, would they have dared?" Hestia cut her off with a sneer that looked deeply unnatural on that sweet face.
"Don’t drag everyone here down to your level just because you’re slow, Ishtar."
Kiriya kept his mouth shut and made a mental note.
’That tongue was a weapon.’
When, exactly, had he learned his goddess could argue like this?
The crowd swung hard behind Hestia, the Ishtar Familia’s many detractors finding their voices all at once — she can’t welch on the bet, a beauty goddess should at least have that much dignity — but Ishtar had simps in equal supply, and they piled in just as fast!
"Didn’t the goddess already explain? Her people acted on their own. She knew nothing about it."
"Exactly. The goddess is innocent here."
"So, Hestia? Still got a complaint?"
With a wall of support at her back, Ishtar’s confidence snapped right back into place.
She planted her hands on her hips and looked down her nose at Hestia, and Hestia’s temper went straight back up.
She’d just opened her mouth to fire again when a hand settled on her shoulder.
Kiriya met her eyes, calm and unbothered. "Relax. I’ve got this."
He looked back at Ishtar and smiled, pleasant as anything.
"It’s fine if you’d rather not admit anything, Goddess Ishtar. From here on, I’ll simply take a personal interest in the Ishtar Familia. I’d watch my step on the way out the door, if I were you."
"The Guild won’t let you do as you like."
"Then by all means," he said lightly, "go ask them to deliver justice to me."
The easy reply sent Ishtar’s blood pressure climbing all over again — because she knew the math as well as he did.
With his strength, he could pick her people off inside the Dungeon and never leave a fingerprint; blame it on a monster and who’d argue?
The Guild couldn’t post a guard on each of them around the clock. And staying out of the Dungeon wasn’t an option.
A prominent Familia owed mandatory expeditions, and beyond that the Dungeon was their bread and butter.
What was she supposed to do, have her people live on air?
She ground her teeth and swallowed it.
Worst case, she’d buy favors from other Familias and hire muscle.
She flatly refused to believe she couldn’t handle one infuriating boy!
"See you around, Goddess Ishtar. Something tells me we’ll be running into each other a lot."
With that, he slid an arm around Hestia’s waist and walked off, leaving Ishtar standing in the wreckage with a face full of shifting shadows and a whole camp of broken soldiers behind her.
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